Posted by Dolda2000 on Dec 09, 2023; 12:28am
URL: https://forum.jogamp.org/32-bit-Windows-natives-tp4043189p4043205.html

gouessej wrote

A clean download page detecting the operating system and suggesting only a single program to download could be an acceptable compromise, couldn't it?

I've seen other sites do that, and I've always thought it's an ugly solution. For example, sometimes you want to download a file on one system and run it on another, and even when that's not the case, OS detection is heuristic at best. In addition, if you just get an EXE file automatically, you might fool people into thinking that it's a Windows-only program.

gouessej wrote

but your launcher program is still limited to the options available in the manifest.

Admittedly true, but I fail to see when that could possibly be a problem.

gouessej wrote

The difference between 100 KB and 100 MB is big when the network isn't very good but if your launcher program has to download some assets, won't it have to download megabytes anyway?

To begin with, all my assets taken together still use far less than a full JRE -- I think it's currently somewhere around 30 MB. But also, again, since it's sometimes desirable to re-download the launcher and to consider it somewhat throw-away, that's still enough reason for me to try and keep it as small as possible. I consider the launcher a replacement for JNLP, which I still find unfortunate that it went away.

gouessej wrote

I don't want to be a killjoy but the end users who fail to run your program because they haven't installed a JRE might not complain at all, it doesn't mean that the problem doesn't exist.

I'd expect there to at least exist a subset of users who would complain, but I can't recall seeing a single complaint ever. There have been requests to be on some common app-stores (which I resent), but none about Java being required.

I'll admit it's not as it was 15 years ago when some prebuilt computers came with Java preinstalled, but in my experience it's not that bad, at least not yet.

It would be nice if there were some executable file format that were supported out of the box on all the common platforms, but until such time as that is the case, I find Java to be the least bad approximation.